Americans Return To Vietnam -- This Time On Package Tours

TORONTO — Unlikely as it sounds, Vietnam has now become a vacation destination.

A Canadian travel agency has put together a package tour -- which it claims is a first in North America -- to half a dozen spots that only 10 years ago used to crop up regularly on the nightly news.

And an executive of the agency says he thinks a number of those signing up for the tour will be American servicemen who once fought in the places they'll now be seeing as tourists.

The Vietnam package is the brainchild of Richard Piechowski, a native of Poland and naturalized Canadian who got interested in taking travelers to Vietnam after his Polish brother paid a visit there.

He said he believes Vietnamese authorities agreed to let him set up a tour because his company was Canadian and not American. ''They told me flatly they wouldn't negotiate with an American company,'' he said.

But he stressed that Americans, as well as Vietnamese who left the country before the fall of Saigon in 1975, would be welcome on the tours.

The 17-day venture will begin and end in Montreal, where Piechowski's agency, Go Travel, is located. The price will be $1,995 per person, double occupancy, including air fare from Montreal, all hotels in Vietnam, tours and motorcoach travel and English-speaking guides.

To avoid the monsoon season, the first tour will not begin until Feb. 4, and Piechowski, Go Travel's marketing director, hopes to run them weekly after that.

Passengers will fly from Montreal to Bangkok via Warsaw aboard LOT Polish Airlines. They will pick up their Vietnamese visas in Bangkok, before leaving for the first stop, Hanoi.

After Hanoi, stops include Da Nang, Khe Sanh, Hue, Nha Trang, My Lai, Vung Tau and Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. Piechowski has scheduled visits to museums, pagodas, beaches and three free days in Saigon.

He describes the Vietnamese hotels as ''clean and the air conditioning works. I went to every one last summer. Every room has its own bath, but you might want to take your own towels.''

To date, Piechowski said, he has received about 80 or 90 inquiries about the tour ''and about 80 percent of those were from Americans.''